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Unusual but lovely

Having recently tried Tesco's onion and chive soft cheese and loved it, I decided to try a few of ASDA's flavoured soft cheeses and added a couple to my basket with my last online order.

The idea of a black pepper soft cheese intrigued me. I have a habit of adding a lot of black pepper to my food as it is, and have a particular liking for those sea salt and black pepper crisps you can get, so I expected that I would really enjoy this.

The cheese comes in a rectangular tub which is sealed with a silvery-blue foil, and has a flimsy-looking clear plastic lid. The packaging is all rather basic, however it does the job and I don't have any huge gripes with it, aside from perhaps preferring a sturdier lid.

The cheese is a creamy white colour and is flecked with rather large pieces of black pepper, which actually look almost blue - something that I must admit puts me off a little bit, not being a fan of blue cheese, merely because it's blue - I'm so shallow! The cheese has quite a thick consistency, yet will spread very easily and I didn't think it had a particularly peppery smell - in fact, I must admit that I didn't really notice a smell at all.

The taste of the cheese surprised me. Before trying this, I guess that I probably expected that the pepper would take over the flavour to the point that you couldn't really taste the cheese. In fact, what I found, was a lovely, creamy soft cheese, and the pepper flavour only really showed up as an after-taste, giving the flavour a little bit of a twist and obviously giving it that slightly hot flavour. I thought the two flavours worked surprisingly well together, and the only time I found it to be a problem, was when I greedily had three slices of toast with this on and by the third slice found that my mouth was beginning to feel a little bit hot, and I needed a glass of water! Serves me right for being so damn greedy when I'm supposed to be on a diet.

Speaking of diet's I did mistakenly think this was from ASDA's diet range when I purchased it, but in fact it's not - it describes itself as 'a medium fat cheese'.

The cheese goes well with most things, like I said I had it spread on toast, as well as in a pitta bread with some lean ham and salad.

According to the box this 200g tub of cheese will provide you with six servings, but I got loads more than that out of it - perhaps I wasn't spreading it on thick enough!

This costs 65p from ASDA which is great value considering they charge almost double for the premium brand Philadelphia (although granted that doesn't have the addition of pepper!).

Overall, I really liked this cheese, it was something a bit different and had a much nicer taste than I expected it would. If like me, you're a fan of the flavour of black pepper, then you have nothing to loose by trying this, just don't eat too much as like I say, it can get hot!